Redact

You are given a block of text and a target sentence hidden inside it. The target is an exact subsequence of the source — the right words, already in the right order, with other words scattered between them. Your job is to black out everything that is not part of it, leaving the target reading cleanly.

• The order never changes. You only ever delete, never rearrange.
• Every word in the target appears in the source in the same sequence.
• Each puzzle was built by inserting filler into a real sentence, so a minimal solution always exists.
• Redacting a word you needed breaks the sentence, and leaving filler in means it does not match.
• The fewest possible deletions is exactly the set of words that were inserted.

• Desktop: click a word to redact or restore it; use the New, Restore All and Hint buttons.
• Phone & tablet: tap a word to toggle its black bar, same one-touch flow.

• Daily: one shared seeded document everyone gets that day.
• Practice: an endless stream of fresh documents.
• Difficulty: Easy, Medium and Hard change document length and how much noise hides the sentence.

• Anchor on the rare words first. An unusual word in the target appears once in the source and pins the sequence around it.
• Read forwards only. Because the target is a subsequence, a candidate word that appears before the one you just matched cannot be part of it.
• When a word appears twice, look at what follows each. Only one of them can continue the target in order.
• Filler tends to be grammatical padding rather than content. Adjectives and connectives are inserted far more often than nouns.
• If you are stuck, work backwards from the last word of the target instead — the constraint runs in both directions.

Blacking out words to leave a different text behind is erasure poetry, also called blackout poetry: found art made by deleting from an existing piece of writing rather than adding to it.

The formal spine is mathematical. The target is an exact subsequence of the source — the right words already in the right order, with other words scattered between them.

Combining the two is the original idea. Erasure poetry has no correct answer, which is the point of it as art and useless as a puzzle; fixing one hidden subsequence gives the same act of removal a single solution, so carving becomes deduction.

Redact reimagines the classic find-the-hidden-message word puzzle as a redaction game, where carving is removal instead of writing. It is an original, free browser game on PlayPendium with a fresh daily document.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.